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Sunday, 23 October 2016

Developers should be able to fire their managers

Many problems developer teams deal with arise from the inverted power structure of their working environment. The idea persists that the person managing the developers is the one who is ultimately in charge, responsible, and accountable.

That idea is wrong, because sometimes the person best-equipped to make the key technological decisions, and the difficult decisions, is the developer, who works hands-on, writing and reading the code to make sure that everything is correct.

A benefit of the 'Accept Risk' workflow, is that it pushes the responsibility to the ones that really matter. I've seen cases when upper-layers of management realise that they are not the ones that should be accepting that particular risk, since they are not the ones deciding on it. In theses cases usualy the decision comes down to the developers, who should use the opportunity to gain a bigger mandate to make the best decisions for the project.

Sometimes, a perverse situation occurs where the managers are no longer coding. They may have been promoted in the past because they used to be great programmers, or for other reasons, but now they are out of touch with programming and they no longer understand how it works.

Their job is to make the developers more productive. They work in customer liaison, they manage the team and its results, they organise, review, handle business requirements and expectations, and make sure everything runs smoothly. That is the job of the manager, and that manager also acts as the voice of the developer team.

This situation promotes inefficiencies and makes the managers more difficult to work with. They don't want to share information, but they do want to take ownership of developers' work or ideas that they didn't have themselves. This environment gets very political very fast, and productivity is effected.

The manager I describe above should ideally be defending the developer team, and should act like an agent for that team. Logically, a developer, or a group of developers, should therefore have the power to nominate, appoint, and sack the manager if necessary.

The developers should hold the balance of power.

Developers should also be able to take decisions on pay, perks, and budgets. Business should treat the developer teams as the grownups they are, because the developer teams are ultimately accountable for what is created within the company.